Journal of medical ethics
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Journal of medical ethics · Aug 2007
Multicenter StudyThe ethics of poverty and the poverty of ethics: the case of Palestinian prisoners in Israel seeking to sell their kidneys in order to feed their children.
Bioethical arguments conceal the coercion underlying the choice between poverty and selling ones organs.
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To carry out an appropriate overview and inventory of the teaching of ethics within the European Union Schools of Medicine. ⋯ Ethics now has an established place within the medical curriculum throughout the European Union. However, there is a notable disparity in programme characteristics among schools of medicine.
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Journal of medical ethics · Aug 2007
Self-interest, self-abnegation and self-esteem: towards a new moral economy of non-directed kidney donation.
As of September 2006, non-directed donation of kidneys and other tissues and organs is permitted in the UK under the new Human Tissue Acts. At the same time as making provision for psychiatric and clinical assessment of so-called "altruistic" donations to complete strangers, the Acts intensify assessments required for familial, genetically related donations, which will now require the same level as genetically unrelated but "emotionally" connected donations by locally based independent assessors reporting to the newly constituted Human Tissue Authority. But there will also need to be considerable reflection on the criteria for "stranger donation", which may lead us to a new understanding of the moral economy of altruistic organ donation, no matter how mixed the motives of the donor may be. This paper looks at some of the issues that will have to be accommodated in such a framework.
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A response is given to the claim by Claxton and Culyer, who stated that the policies of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) do not evaluate patients rather than treatments. The argument is made that the use of values such as quality of life and life-years is ethically dubious when used to choose which patients ought to receive treatments in the National Health Service (NHS).